D.W.Griffith Essay -- Biography Biographies Bio

Perhaps no other coach has generated such a broad range of critical reaction as D.W. Griffith. For students of the motion picture, Griffiths is the or so familiar name in hire history. in the main acknowledged as the Statess most influential director (and certainly wiz of the most prolific), he is also perceived as being among the most limited. Praise for his mastery of film technique is matched by repeated indictments of his moral, artistic, and dexterous inadequacies. At one extreme, Kevin Brownlow has characterized him as the only director in America creative enough to be called a genius. At the other, Paul Rotha calls his component part to the advance of film negligible and Susan Sontag complains of his supreme vulgarity and even vacuity his work reeks of a fervid moralizing about sexuality and delirium and his energy comes from suppressed voluptuousness.Griffith started his directing cargoner in 1908, and in the pursual five years made some 485 films, almost all of whic h pay been preserved. These films, one or two reels in length, gift customarily been regarded as apprentice works, films in which, to quote Stephen Zito, Griffith borrowed, invented, and perfected the forms and techniques that he later utilize to such memorable effect in The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, low-down Blossoms, and Way Down East. These early Biographs (named after the studio at which Griffith worked) have usually been studied for their stylistic features, nonably parallel editing, camera placement, and sermon of light and shadow. Their most famous structuring devices are the last-minute rescue and the cross-cut.In recent years, however, the Biographs have assumed higher status in film history. Many historians and critics rank the... ...oes Griffith create the impression of narrative immobility?By and large, Griffiths films of the mid- and late mid-twenties have not fared well critically, although they have their defenders. The everyday viewthat Griffiths work became dull and undistinguished when he lost his personalized studio at Mamaroneck in 1924continues to prevail, despite calls from John Dorr, Arthur Lennig, and Richard Roud for re-evaluation. The eight films he made as a contract director for Paramount and get together Artists are usually studied (if at all) as examples of late 1920s studio style. What critics find startling about themparticularly the United Artists featuresis not the lack of quality, but the absence of any identifiable Griffith traits. Only Abraham capital of Nebraska and The Struggle (Griffiths two sound films) are recognizable as his work, and they are usually treated as early 1930s oddities.